


Foggy Nelson, Super Sleuth!

by hxcpanda



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Fake Alcoholism, Foggy Nelson Is a Good Bro, Gratuitous italics, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, M/M, Matt Murdock is actually a huge liar, Mutual Pining, Not Canon Compliant, Secret Identity, WIP, but I'm an angsty bastard so it's probably not at all, kind of anyway, meant to be funny, probably a strange amount of alliteration and assonance for prose, takes place in S1 in theory but there's no Fisk stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-11-02 03:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20599217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hxcpanda/pseuds/hxcpanda
Summary: In which a Foggy who is unaware of Matt’s double identity as Daredevil does a bit of innocent spy work to try and pinpoint why his law partner keeps showing up to the office looking worse for the wear—and lying about it. In which Matt knows all about Foggy’s newfound passion for sleuthing and goes out of his way to plant fake evidence for the sake of protecting Daredevil, only to fuel Foggy’s worries. In which the lies start to spiral out of control, and their supposedly one-sided crushes on each other are only two of them.





	Foggy Nelson, Super Sleuth!

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I haven't written anything creative in at least 5 years and this is my first foray into writing Daredevil, but hopefully this isn't shit!  
Really would love some comments if you have the energy!

Look, it’s not as though Foggy had planned this—it was certainly far from his ideal Wednesday night menu of leftover pad thai and a Netflix binge picked up from the night before. And if he _had_ planned this, well, he certainly would have changed into whatever the male version of yoga pants (basketball shorts?) was, rather than his regular office gear. Something a bit more breathable, better suited to the stickiness of mid-summer Manhattan. Better suited to whatever the fuck he was playing at as he peered out from behind a particularly foul dumpster.

Foggy eyed his quarry and, not for the first time that night, second-guessed himself; he wasn’t even sure what he was looking for, never mind the ethical considerations. But, both of those things, he rationalized, were perhaps problems for future Foggy: come up empty-handed Foggy; caught red-handed Foggy. Not for the Foggy who was busy gauging the appropriate distance at which to continue his awkward pursuit.

When he finally confirmed that the man he was following had reached the street corner at an angle suggesting he were about to turn, Foggy stood up. He tossed his folded suit jacket onto his other arm as he walked, and tugged at his right shirt sleeve, which was very much glued to the sweaty inside of his elbow. He sighed. So much for comfortable sleuthing.

A few seconds later he, too, had rounded the corner. He quickly confirmed that he hadn’t lost his target.

Matt was still within view, walking the last couple blocks to his apartment on the otherwise deserted street, white cane swishing out back and forth before him. That is, he had been walking until he stopped, suddenly. He cocked his head downward and to the left, as if he were listening for something.

Foggy, seeing this, and being, to be honest, not quite as accomplished a spy as maybe he had been letting himself start to believe behind that dumpster, let out what some could argue was a reasonably audible, “Shit.” He then danced on the balls of his feet, floundering, before opting to flatten himself against the wall of a nearby building. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if somehow that would prevent Matt from _hearing _him. _You fucking idiot_, he thought, eyes still tight. _Senses don’t work like that!_

And yet, it took considerable effort for him to open them again; his bated breath swelled in his chest as the sidewalk re-materialized in front of him. He seemed to be in the clear, though, because Matt had reluctantly begun moving forward again. Against all the concentration Foggy was ostensibly directing towards keeping quiet, however, the air that rushed out of his lungs at his relief seemed decidedly loud. He shoved a belated hand over his mouth and inched carefully in Matt’s direction.

He’d gotten about ten feet when Matt once again came to an abrupt halt. Foggy’s heart stammered. His body did the physical equivalent of mixing two alternative greetings in front of a cashier; he could have stopped walking or he could have kept it nonchalant and passed Matt only to double back later—not like he could see him to identify him. Only, he did neither, somehow tripping vaguely forwards over his own feet instead. He felt heat rise to his cheeks as he reflexively checked his surroundings for nonexistent bystanders.

Foggy straightened up and regarded Matt standing there quietly. His law partner, best friend, what-have-you, was tense as a wire. Foggy felt a quick surge of remorse. Not only was he acting like a bona fide stalker, he hadn’t given a thought to how scary it might be for a blind guy to notice he was being followed.

In the midst of warring with himself over whether to turn around and go home or to…keep standing there like an ass, Foggy choked when Matt spoke without turning around.

“Foggy? Is that you?” His voice was low, tentative.

What came out of Foggy’s mouth next was like a reflex, albeit a bad one. “What? No. Of course not.”

Foggy chuckled helplessly at the sky. As a lawyer with a well-functioning sense of humor, he generally prided himself on his ability to often improvise exactly what needed to be said in a given situation. Here he found his mind had gone bizarrely blank.

* * *

About two weeks earlier, Foggy had been dangling the last bite of breakfast burrito in front of his mouth when he heard the front door of the office swing open and the yelp of surprise from Karen that followed it. He shoved the rest into his mouth, mostly not knowing what else to do with it, before shooting out of his office to see what was happening.

By the time he got there, Karen had Matt cornered in the doorway, the latter with cane held high in protest; she was also rather inconveniently blocking Foggy's view of whatever was causing all the hubbub.

“Karen, it’s fine. Really,” Matt was saying, a slightly bemused tone to his voice, like he either couldn’t fathom how somebody could make such a big deal out of something so little, or maybe that somebody cared enough to _make_ a big deal out of it. Knowing Matt, it was probably a mixture of the two.

“This— this is not even close to the realm of _fine_, Matt.”

His view still obstructed, but the remains of his food now having traveled safely down his esophagus, Foggy took his best guess. “What, does his tie clash with his suit jacket? Is the ol’ fashion criminal at it again?” he joked.

Karen stepped aside, at the same time turning on her heel so that she was facing Foggy now. She pointed, with an intensity that drew her eyebrows together, to Matt’s face.

Foggy sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh,” he breathed out again slowly.

Matt frowned. “Is it really that bad? I assumed it would color because of the tenderness, but from your reactions you’d think I’d lost a chunk of my face.”

“Well, it’s just...,” Foggy began, trailing off when he realized any narration couldn’t possibly capture the almost pointillist nature of the bruise formed around Matt’s eye and cheekbone. “Hold on, take off your glasses so I can see it better.”

“Foggy!” Karen scolded him. “We don’t have time for that; Matt needs to tell us what happened.” She gave Matt a pointed look, not quite noticing in the moment that it would be lost on him.

But Matt was already obliging Foggy, trying to stifle a smile for Karen’s sake as he offered up his face for inspection.

Foggy raised a finger triumphantly not but two seconds later. “I’ve got it! It looks like there’s a red and purple galaxy on your cheek, spiraling out from I guess what we can say is a yellow-ish epicenter? It’s art, really.” He hummed, impressed, and then stepped away as if to admire the whole context of a large painting at an art gallery. And, well, he _was_ admiring the whole painting if today was going to be a day where he admitted that to himself. To be honest, Matt’s shiner was a very red cherry on top of an equally appealing vanilla sundae. It took all of Foggy’s effort to reel in any further comments on his buddy’s appearance, but he tucked away those thoughts to probe again later when alone.

Karen shot him a wholly disapproving look once he was finished with his charade. “_Anyway_,” she began again, with a certain emphasis that discouraged any more interruptions, “would you mind telling us what happened to your pretty face, Matt?”

Matt smirked in that way that sometimes caught Foggy off guard, made him feel like he’d turned around to greet his new roommate for the first time and been floored all over again by his beauty. This may have been one of those sometimes, and Foggy’s breath may have hitched _just the tiniest bit _in his throat. Man, his record for keeping it cool and not at all thirsty was not faring so well this morning… _Oh for two. Keep it together, Nelson!_

“I thought it was just implied that my face is even prettier now. ‘Art,’ I believe the term was.”

Karen let out a groan of exasperation. “I honestly don’t know how you two _bamboozled_ me into working here with you idiots.” She pinched the bridge of her nose as if in genuine pain.

“Alright, alright,” Matt relented. “Tell you over coffee?”

And so Matt regaled Foggy and Karen with a tale of how he’d been mugged, dragged into a back alley, and, when the mugger had found but a $10 bill in Matt’s wallet he’d gotten angry and shoved Matt face-first into the sharp corner of a dumpster before taking off. Both Karen and Foggy advocated for going to the police, but when Matt calmly reminded them it wasn’t like he had even witnessed his own mugging, they quickly dropped it. As Matt’s brilliant shiner gradually faded into a queasy green over the next week, so too did the mugging from the forefronts of everyone’s minds.

* * *

Clearly having pinned Foggy from his voice, Matt turned around to confront his would-be stalker. “Why are you following me?” His eyebrow was raised and the corners of his mouth twitching. Foggy was glad to see that he didn’t seem entirely too concerned by his friend’s utterly strange behavior.

“I, uh… I wasn’t following you…per se.” Foggy scratched the back of his head sheepishly.

“No?”

“I just wanted to—.” He cut himself off and decided to pivot pronouns. “You were being weird, dude!”

“Oh?”

Foggy’s voice scaled up an octave when he next spoke. “Oh my God! Get the fuck out of here with these one-syllable questions!” Matt’s eyebrows, which still hadn’t descended—in fact had risen even higher—, were starting to piss Foggy off. Or maybe he was getting hysterical because he couldn’t think of a lie to excuse his odd behavior. Who could tell, really?

Oh God, what if Matt started to think Foggy was stalking him? Had been stalking him since they’d moved into their own apartments post-Columbia? While that was certainly a concern, even scarier was the possibility that Matt would read into this incident that Foggy had certain… “romantic feelings” for him, which, well, was true. But certainly not the kind of true that should be out there! Foggy really didn’t need to feel Matt’s pity when he learned that his best friend had been sporting a ginormous unrequited crush since forever. That would be…not nice.

When it seemed that Matt was leaning rather heavily on the notion that the stalker should be the one to explain to the stalkee the reasons for said stalking and it was clear he wasn’t going to be first to speak, Foggy mustered up his courage to try the whole words thing again.

“I was worried, okay! It’s not…_usual_ for somebody to show up to work three times in two weeks with different injuries. Even if that somebody is blind!” he added.

* * *

The second time it was just a knick over his eyebrow on the non-bruised half of his face. It was maybe a centimeter of dark red, perfectly matched to Matt’s glasses. Foggy couldn’t put into words why, but he’d felt it was better not to comment at the time. Karen must have had the same idea, because she just pursed her lips and went back to stapling.

Home from the office later that day, Foggy found his mind drifting back towards the scratch. Matt hadn’t bothered to explain it, which could only mean it didn’t matter, right? He’d probably just misjudged the distance between his head and the outward swing of his overhead cabinet. It could happen to anyone. Or. _Or! _Maybe he’d dropped something off the side of his bed and whacked his face into his nightstand when he bent over to pick it up. Foggy was, like, 70% sure that he’d done that at some point and almost lost an eye in the process. That could be it. Perfectly reasonable.

Way more reasonable than, say, Matt being part of an underground fight club or something. Foggy shook his head sharply. Man, his brain had a way of escalating things pretty quickly. Matt was definitely _not_ part of an underground fight club. Even if his dad had been a boxer and he never skipped leg day, judging from that ass. Foggy bit his lip.

_Whoa, whoa there, Nelson. Stop objectifying your best friend._

So, yeah, nothing to worry about. It was definitely the nightstand. Perfectly reasonable.

* * *

“Foggy, I don’t know what to tell you. I guess my luck’s just been really shit this month,” Matt laughed, but there was a guarded quality to it that Foggy couldn’t help but seize upon.

“Why do I feel like that’s only a half-truth?” He placed his hands on his hips.

“You’re welcome to tell me any theories you might have.”

Foggy fumbled, particularly weak to that brand of Matt’s cockiness. “Okay, fine. Because I haven’t amassed enough proof to _disprove_ this theory, I will ask your thoughts on this one: you’re part of an underground fight club.”

Matt’s laugh rang out clear and genuine at that, and Foggy took that to be the “definitely not” that he needed. There was a reason that Foggy had led with the most implausible theory, and it was that he actually had come around to a real one. It just…wasn’t ideal, to say the least.

* * *

They’d been out for drinks at Josie’s, celebrating a win on a case, having gotten their client the unpaid wages she was owed after she’d been fired from her job without notice. Matt had been charged with grabbing more alcohol after having lost spectacularly at a round of pool, much as he did most of the time for obvious reasons.

Foggy, hands rested on the top of his pool cue, looked over towards the bar while Karen switched angles for what had to be the eighth time. He’d been expecting to see either one of two things: Matt trying to catch a busy Josie’s attention or Matt smooth talking a lady. What he had _not _expected to see was Matt in the midst of some sort of altercation with a dude who looked, to put it nicely, like he’d probably spent some time behind bars at some point and indeed might go back.

It looked like Matt had, actually, gotten their next round of drinks and was doing his God-honest best not to spill them as he spat whatever he was saying to the guy. Foggy didn’t know what was going on, but he had only seen Matt go that pale with fury once, and Foggy had had to hold him back from decking the other guy in the face. Or, more likely, getting himself decked in the face by his much more seeing opponent. Which meant that, in this moment, possibly something similar was about to go down.

Foggy braced himself before heading over to perform backup duty. “I’ll be right back, Karen,” he said, and leaned his pool cue against the wall.

As soon as he’d started to make his way, Foggy saw the guy shove Matt backwards, causing the drinks he was holding to slosh about half their contents onto his shirt; Foggy hastily moved to place himself in between them before things could escalate any further.

“—don’t care if you’re blind if _you _fucking threaten _me_ ever again—”

“Hey, hey, break it up,” Foggy said as coolly as he could manage, although heavy breathing somewhat betrayed his inner state. “We don’t want to, uh, ruin the ambiance of this fine establishment, do we?”

“Foggy—”

“Who the fuck are _you_?” snarled the man. His whiskey breath blew directly in Foggy’s eyes. They started to water; he had to curb the urge to blink furiously.

“I’m a lawyer. Now if you’d kindly back off of my friend here before you violate your parole, we’ll be on our way.”

Miraculously, the mention of parole seemed to change the stakes for the man, and, while his face twitched, he did take a step backwards almost demurely in comparison to his prior demeanor.

“Foggy—,” Matt started again.

Foggy shushed him and steered him back toward the pool table by the elbow before he could protest further, and before the other guy could piece together his bluff.

“What the fuck were you thinking, Matt? If you could see that guy you’d know he’s not someone you’d want to rough and tumble with. He pretty much _oozes_ felon vibes.” Foggy wiggled the fingers of his free hand for emphasis at the word “oozes.” He thought it probably wasn’t necessary to narrate that part.

Matt sneered darkly as they returned to where Karen was waiting. “I could have handled myself. I’m not helpless, you know.”

“Sure, yeah, ‘cause you’d be great in a bar fight,” Foggy scoffed. He considered for a second that maybe he was being a bit mean, but then again, he reasoned, he just didn’t want Matt to get hurt; it couldn’t be a fair fight if one of them was blind, right?

Karen looked at them both quizzically. “What was that all about?”

“It was nothing,” Matt insisted, and the aura he exuded was so abrasive that the almost-scuffle was dropped from the conversation entirely, but not from Foggy’s mind.

Foggy lay in bed that night, the ceiling spinning marginally above him, and turned the events of the evening over in his mind. Matt. That guy. Both angry but _Matt_, Matt’s anger had been bordering on full-blown rage. Foggy reminded himself that he didn’t have all the facts, but he also didn’t think that seemed much like the mild-mannered Catholic boy he ran a do-gooder law firm with either.

There was something else, too. By the time they’d taken their leave of Josie’s, Matt had been too unsteady on his feet to walk on his own, and so Foggy had taken him under his shoulder on the way out. To be blunt, it was uncharacteristic of Matt to be so sloppy. Something was going on. Foggy knew it.

Foggy yawned with his whole face and rolled over. He’d get to the bottom of it…

Although Foggy had vowed to himself in his bleary, drunken state that he would figure it out—whatever “it” was—he had made absolutely zero progress until the third injury.

Matt came into the office that morning guns blazing. “I know what you’re going to say, and yes, I absolutely fell into an open manhole.”

Foggy momentarily forgot himself and took far too large of a sip of his far too hot coffee. “Ow!” he hissed, the word pulling double duty as he surveyed Matt’s split lip. “Jesus, Matt. What actually happened?”

Matt hesitated. “It’s really stupid.” He fiddled with the strap of his cane.

“I’m gesturing for you to go on.”

“I had my cane half folded and I’d put it in between my legs for a second to keep it upright while I tied my shoes. Only when I bent down to actually put on my shoes I kind of forgot it was there and I jammed my mouth down on it pretty hard…” Matt smiled weakly. “Stupid, right?”

“Yes, but I still love you,” Foggy had said, but it had sunk when it left his lips rather than falling gracefully.

Some hours later, Foggy poked his head into Matt’s open doorway. “Hey Matt, can I ask you something?”

Matt turned his face towards the sound of Foggy’s voice. “Yeah? What’s up?”

“This is gonna sound kind of random,” he hedged, “but did you uh…did you go out last night? I stopped by your apartment on a whim and you didn’t answer but it wasn’t important enough to text you about so I just left.”

Foggy had not, in fact, stopped by Matt’s apartment. And that whim he spoke of? That whim was buoying him now as he made up a story to wheedle out the information he wanted.

“Actually,” Matt began, licking his lips, “I went out for a drink.” He adjusted his glasses with his right hand, left still paused in place over the Braille brief he’d been reading. “Not at Josie’s,” he added. “A different place, not sure of the name.”

“Yeah?” Foggy tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear and searched for something natural to say to continue the conversation. He could be normal and ask if the place was any good. Or, yeah, he could totally ask, “Alone?” _Not at all a weird way to develop the thread, Foggy._ He scrambled to recover his metaphorical footing. “I mean, is there a new lady in your life that you neglected to tell me about, Murdock? Was it a date?”

“Heh, no, I didn’t have a date. Just some good Jameson.”

“Well maybe the next time we decide to take a break from Josie’s you’ll have to introduce me to the place.”

* * *

Thus it was that Foggy had found himself tailing Matt home, with half a working theory on those injuries.

Evidence Exhibit A: Matt’s black eye, the deep scratch on his forehead, and the split lip all screamed “I’ve been hit in the face with somebody’s fist.”

Evidence Exhibit B: The altercation with that shady guy in the bar that might have veered toward violence had Foggy not stepped in.

Evidence Exhibit C: Yet another trip to a bar leading to a split lip.

Bars, alcohol, fists on faces… It didn’t take a genius to put those pieces together into one logical puzzle, and Foggy had graduated from Columbia, after all.

“In case you need to hear it, no, Foggy, I’m not part of a fight club. Though I did enjoy the book, interesting take on violence and masculinity.”

Foggy blinked. “Wait, there’s a book? —No, scratch that.” Matt was the master of misdirection; Foggy would just have to leave no wiggle room. “Alright, I’m just gonna ask you straight out then, and, like, you really don’t have anything to hide from me because you’re my best friend, so…”

Matt’s brow creased. “A preamble like that doesn’t exactly sound like it’s going anywhere good, Fogs.”

“No, I know. But. Do you think. _Maybe_.” Foggy was really trying to choose his words carefully and he knew it showed in his stops and starts. _Out with it_. “Do you think maybe drinking might be becoming a problem if you’re getting into so many bar fights? Or, like, bar fights at all?” Foggy scrunched up his face.

Matt’s lips parted in surprise. A car horn sounded somewhere nearby as he seemed to struggle to formulate his response. “Foggy, that’s…”

“Matt, be honest with me, did you even get mugged or did you just make that up because you were embarrassed?”

“Foggy, come on. I—okay that may have technically taken place behind a bar but I didn’t _lie_ to you.”

“Alright,” Foggy pressed on, “what about the other times then?”

“Foggy, _they_ were being assholes and I, I got angry but I don’t think it’s accurate to say I have a _problem_ or anything. It was only twice.”

Matt’s head was tilted downward, in what Foggy usual thought of as his “earnest pose.” He supposed he’d have to take him at his word that he didn’t think he had a problem. The thing was, though, that Matt didn’t often have much self-awareness. Foggy flashed back to their last semester of law school, when Matt’s denial that he was a human being who needed both food and sleep landed him in Health Services with an IV stuck in his arm. The guy could be concerning, to be honest.

And that was precisely why Foggy couldn’t see Matt being cooperative in the event that he _was_ having a problem. There was only one way to go about this—Matt simply couldn’t be aware that he was being helped.

“Thrice if you count the other night with Karen,” Foggy sang.

“Okay, you’re right, three times. I guess I’ve been a little stressed lately, that’s all.” Matt rubbed the back of his neck and shuffled his feet.

Foggy clapped a hand on Matt’s shoulder and gently redirected him back in the direction of his apartment. “I’m glad you were honest with me, and I’m sorry I…snuck up on you,” he said as they started walking.

Matt inhaled sharply. “No, I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have lied to you and I…I feel like an idiot.” He grimaced.

“Let’s just forget it, yeah?” Foggy said quickly, even as he reflected on how he would need more information about the extent of his friend’s burgeoning alcoholism before he could do anything about it. Good thing he’d taken that film noir elective, because he’d been prepping his alter-ego for just such a task ever since. It seemed the world was finally ready to reckon with the extraordinary existence of the one, the only—Foggy Nelson, Super Sleuth!


End file.
